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The Airbus team is training a prototype rover to recognise and pick up small cylinders off the ground. It's a rehearsal for a key part of a multi-billion-dollar project now being put together by the US and European space agencies - Nasa and Esa.
Returning rock and dust materials to Earth laboratories will be the best way to confirm if life exists on Mars. It is, though, going to take more than a decade to achieve.
The small tubes - about the size of whiteboard markers - being manipulated by the Airbus prototype represent the Martian samples.
The idea is that these will have been selected, packaged and cached on the surface of the Red Planet at various locations by the Americans' next big rover, which launches in seven months' time. It would then be the job of a later European robot, launching in 2026, to run around and pick up the cylinders. This "fetch rover" would deliver the tubes to a handling station, from where they could be despatched to Earth. They would arrive home in 2031.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 06 2019, @08:11PM (1 child)
Nah, Mars life would get absolutely mutilated by Earth life. It will get g-checked and shot up at the moment of first contact.
And in the case of Earth life contaminating Mars, it will just hang around at the topsoil and die, while Martian life thrives in underground lakes, assuming it exists.
(life = microbes)
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @06:57AM
Most likely, yes, but we really don't know for sure. We cannot say there is zero risk.